How to meet product safety requirements under Australian law

Do you sell products to Australian customers? Or do you manufacture products for the Australian market? If so, do you know for sure that they meet Australian Consumer Law (ACL) safety standards?

There are serious penalties and other equally unappealing consequences if you sell any non-compliant product on the Australian market, even online. So here is what you need to do to ensure both your company and, equally importantly, your customers are protected.

Make it absolutely clear

That means providing clear instructions for proper use and clear warnings against any possible misuse for every product you manufacture or sell. Fail to do so and you risk breaching the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (CCA) and that means action will be taken against you.

Control quality

Your company must implement correct quality control measures to ensure every product meets mandatory levels of safety and won't cause harm when used as it's supposed to be used, or in a reasonable manner.

You are not legally required to test products, but if the safety of your customers is important to you, it's a good policy to do mandatory testing before putting any product up for sale.

Get recall plans in place

If the worse comes to the worse and one of your products proves to be a safety risk, you may be required to recall all sold products. For this you will need to have proper recall plans and procedures already set out.

You'll also need to know how you are going to quickly and effectively communicate your recall message to the public with clear guidelines of how they go about returning faulty products.

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